Categories
Entrepreneurs

The 3 Top Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Needs to Focus On

Have you ever seen those commercials where the business owner talks about wearing every hat including the janitor’s?

While those commercials are definitely true, what I don’t like about them is they also imply it’s okay to KEEP wearing all sorts of hats in your business, like the janitors.

You see, it’s one thing when you first start out to do everything in your business. At that point you have more time, less clients and not a lot of money flowing in. And chances are you’re so excited you WANT to be working on your business all the time.

The problem comes in when you never leave that place. If you’re one of those entrepreneurs or business owners who feels like you “must have a hand in everything or it falls apart/isn’t done right/doesn’t get done at all/etc” then this is definitely for you. Because, you see, you will NEVER build a sustainable, profitable business unless you stop doing and start leading.

And the first step is to stop wading around in the details and instead take a step back and start looking at the big picture of your business. (I mean, if YOU don’t have the big picture view of your business, who does?)

So with that in mind, here are the 3 top things you need to keep a big picture eye on in your business if you want it to grow to a successful, sustainable, profitable business:

1. Vision. Are you on track to reaching your overall goals? Are you staying in integrity with your overall brand and message? Are you creating confusion in the marketplace with your offerings or are they in line with what your ideal clients want from you?

It’s very important to have an overall plan for your business and to be working that plan. Without a plan it’s very easy to be flailing around and not be building any traction or momentum. (Or even worse, be slowly sinking because you’re created confusion in the marketplace.)

2. Finances. Do you know where you sit financially? What is your cash flow each month? Your expenses? Also do you know when you need to be marketing? For instance, you have a 6-month coaching program — do you have plan so you can launch your program every 6 months? Even if it’s a rolling program (meaning people can join anytime) you still need set times in your schedule where you know you’ll be actively marketing to attract new clients into your programs.

3. Marketing. Do you have a marketing and promotional calendar in place? Does it include regular marketing tasks (like writing your ezine) along with program and product launches? Are you following it? This is something else you need to keep an eye on — how your marketing is going. And if it’s not going, then this needs to be a priority for you to get it going.

Now this doesn’t mean YOU have to do all this work yourself — what is does means is you need to be aware of the big picture of what exactly is happening in your business and then figure out the best way to get all the tasks completed in the most efficient way possible.

Categories
Business Trends

The Customization Craze

In past generations, having a customized, tailored article of clothing was a luxury, which not many could afford.  Going to a tailor or seamstress to create a one-of-a kind piece was reserved for highly specialized occasions, or for the very wealthy.

However, with advanced technology, a new trend has emerged: customization. The customization craze is taking almost every industry by storm, from athletic shoes, clothing, t-shirts, purses handbags, and even cookware and furniture.  Items can either be fully customized, or be created using mass customization.  When a customer purchases an item using mass customization, the user is able to choose from a list of styles and options to make the item unique and highly individualized.

However, the customization craze does not stop at mass customization.  A fully customized item can also be available.  Some designer lines are now offering customers the ability to create a fully customized item online using their interactive online services, or even an iPhone application.  Not only is the item itself highly customized, but the way in which we even order the item is just as specialized.

Ordering a highly customized item can be attractive to those who use social media or crowdsourcing to recommend items.  Crowdsourcing involves asking large groups of people, usually on social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter, advice about products.  Users are also able to show off a customized item that they created and bought online using an interactive tool.  This indirectly creates a word-of-mouth advertisement for the item.  Friends, and other users of the site, are able to not only see the product, but may want to purchase a similar item for themselves.  Keeping up with the Jones is now high-tech and digital!

Technology has now enabled customized t-shirts to be either fully or partially customized at an affordable price.  Many websites now offer customers the ability to create customized t-shirts in large or small quantities for affordable prices.  Although this trend has been available for quite some time, customers are now able to customize their t-shirts, ordering in very small quantities.  For example, using an interactive tool on the company’s website, customers can now create a t-shirt with a personal picture, logo, or statement, and order just one shirt.

Existing and start-up companies may wish to consider cashing in on this customization craze.  Companies which already are well-established into the market, like Nike, have begun offering customers the ability to mass customize some of their existing lines, adding specialized colors, materials, and engraving.  This allows such companies to charge full retail price for the item, bringing in customers who may have been previously using discount websites.

Everyone seems to love a unique, highly customized item which they can create using a fun, interactive online tool or application.  Even if the customized item means that the customer will have to pay a full, retail amount, the price seems to be well-worth it, when showing off the item in social media sites or other gatherings.  Customization, it seems, is the wave of the future.

Article contributed by Jenna Smith

Categories
Sales & Marketing

Ways to Increase Sales and Grow Revenues

Every prospect wants to know why they should buy from you. They want to know the outcome they will experience before they want to know how you will create those outcomes. Let’s start with four basic facts …

1.    Every prospect has a problem. This problem creates some negative emotions.

2.    Every product has features: Features are merely objective facts about a product (or the company behind it). In three-dimensional products, features include size, shape, weight, construction, color options and more. You need to be able to tell your prospect the feature of your product or service that will solve the problem. In information products, features include number of pages, size, frequency of publication (for periodicals) and the types of information that are presented.

3.    Fortunately, most features are there for a darned good reason: Prospects don’t want features. They want you to change their lives for the better. Product features are merely the means to that end. That means features can have a place in ad copy – like telling prospects how many issues they’ll get per year … how many big pages are in your book … or that your widget is made from carbon steel for strength or carbon fiber for lightness.

Beyond that, features are a yawn because they’re about the product; not about the prospect. Or, as in the examples above, they can help demonstrate how your product delivers a benefit. The good news is, just about every product fact – every feature – is there to provide a benefit that your prospect IS willing to pay for. Tell your prospect in no uncertain terms the benefits of a particular feature. But we do not want to stop there.

4.    Each benefit has a positive emotional outcome for the buyer. Many time there are more benefits associated with each product feature than are obvious to the average buyer. Each benefit or combination of benefits producing one, two, three or more new benefits you never thought about before. The secret to selling and marketing and most any other revenue generating activity is to identify each and every benefit a product provides – and the emotional outcome your buyer will experience.

5.    Your prospect is buying emotionally first, then they intellectualize & justify the purchase. Connecting the feature, benefits and outcomes makes it very easy for the buying to understand why you are the right and safe choice.

Outcome that sing and soar – in five simple steps

Here’s a little exercise to help you drill down to the outcomes prospects are willing to pay for and then connect those benefits with powerful response-boosting emotions that your prospect already has about those benefits (or the lack of them) in his life.

By the time you’re through, you will have a complete list of company and product features … you will have squeezed every possible benefit out of those features … you will have fully defined the outcomes of those benefits and you will have connected each one to a powerful emotion your prospect has about each one of them.

In short, you’ll have a comprehensive “features/benefits/emotional outcome” inventory you can refer to as you create your marketing message, write your copy, build your sales presentation or create contents for your website.

Going through this exercise can go a long way towards finding new themes and adding power to your sales and marketing.

To begin, create a spreadsheet with these headings:

  • Problem
  • Negative Emotional Outcomes of Problem
  • Feature that Solves the Problem
  • Tangible Benefits of that Feature
  • Positive Emotional Outcome Prospect with Experience
  • Rank

Write until all know problems are identified and documented. Document how they feel when they experience this problem. Next write the feature of your product or service that solves the problem and document the benefit of that feature. Finally, describe the positive emotional outcome the buyer will experience.

When complete, rank them in order of importance.

He is an example of what your table should look like.

Problem: Sales have plateaued

Emotional Impact of Problem: So frustrated because no matter what I do, I just can’t figure out how to take the sales to the next level. And I’m always the one having to do the sales

Feature: Learn how to build a sales and marketing system

Benefit of Feature: You can stop being the only “sales guy” and start leveraging your marketing and sales processes so that customers come to you to purchase, instead of you chasing them. You will grow sales!

Emotional Outcome: You’ll feel a great sense of relief … no more anxiety about “where is the next sale going to come from?” and you won’t have to be chasing prospective customers all the time … prospects who are hiding from you.

When you complete this process you will have all the material you need to write a great sales letter, create compelling web copy, and build a powerful sales presentation and some much more.

This process is where increase profits and grow sales begins. You need to understand your prospects better than they understand themselves. When completed, you can tell them exactly what they can expect when they work with you.

Categories
Planning & Management

How to Create a New Client System in 5 Steps

Did you know that for EVERYTHING you want to do in your business you need to create a system for it?  The real secret to a successful business is having the right systems in place that support and grow that business.

And this comes down to getting new clients too.  If you’re finding that you don’t yet have a full practice of clients, or your flow of clients is very inconsistent (think feast or famine), then I suggest you look at the systems you currently have in place for getting more clients.

You want to be in a position where you have a constant flow of:

>> New client enquiries.

>> Strategy sessions (on your calendar every week).

>> Adding potential clients to your contact management system.

>> Follow-up processes for converting a potential client into a paying client.

And so the cycle goes on in your business.  It happens regularly, like clockwork, and because you have the RIGHT client systems set up to support your new client flow, everything runs smoothly.

In order to make this happen, here are the steps you need to take:

Step 1: KNOW Your Numbers. Knowing exactly how many people you need to speak to on a daily basis is key to maintaining a steady flow of clients coming into your business.  Once you know this number it completely eliminates all of the guesswork out of running your business.  If you’re not working with the number of clients you want to be working with, it’s probably because you haven’t figured this number out yet.

Step 2: ASK for The Strategy Session. This is where many business owners fall down!  They don’t ASK clients to have a strategy session with them. Instead they will kid themselves that it’s more important that they [update their website / connect on Facebook / fill-in-the-blank here] rather than ASK a client to have a strategy session with them.  Once you take a systemized approach to ASKING clients to have strategy sessions with you, it becomes so much easier to maintain a new client flow.

Step 3: BOOK Your Strategy Sessions.  By creating a system, which I call your Client Booking System, you can very easily eliminate those tyre-kickers, and ensure that your potential clients actually TURN UP for their Strategy Sessions … no more frustrating no-shows!

Step 4: PREP for Your Strategy Sessions. Once you get on the phone (or in a face-to-face meeting) with a potential client you want to make sure that your Strategy Sessions lead to a successful outcome … i.e. a new client.  So it’s really important that you take the necessary steps beforehand to prepare for your strategy sessions.

Step 5: FOLLOW-UP with ALL of Your Clients. All of your hard work up to this point won’t be worth a hill of beans unless you have a robust follow-up system in place.  Not all of your clients who you have a strategy session with will say YES right away… some may want to think about it; and for others it may not be the right time.  I have a client working with me right now at my highest level.  We didn’t start our work together until almost a year after her initial strategy session. And she told me that it was because I’d kept up with the follow-up and stayed in touch with her that when she was ready, I was right there.  Had I not had such a robust follow-up system in place that would have meant lost revenue.

So, if you need more clients in order to reach the income level that you want to get to, take a look at at what you’re currently doing to make that happen. Do you have your new client systems in place?  If you take a systemized approach to getting new clients, as outlined above, you will very quickly see your practice fill.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

4 Proven Ways to Restore Your Sanity While Running Your Solo Business

It’s a familiar scenario: Solo business owner is swamped just wading through emails, keeping up with social media, serving customers. No time to create new products or work on that marketing campaign.

Is this you? If so, I have four proven ways that successful solo entrepreneurs use to wrestle back control of their business, get the daily job done and still have time to grow their businesses.

1.    Tame Your Inbox

Email is probably the number one task that sucks up our time. Answering customer questions, reading newsletters, responding to joint venture requests, communicating with your support team — it can add up to dozens of emails seemingly needing your instant attention. And even if you clear your inbox in the morning, new emails come in hourly that can distract you from tasks that require concentrated attention.

Ways to take control of your inbox:

  • Unsubscribe from half of the newsletters you are currently getting. Starting with the ones that you haven’t had a chance to read in the last few months. If they were important to your business efforts now, you’d be reading them. You can always sign up again later.
  • Deal immediately with items you can delegate, respond to in less than two minutes, or file away.
  • Set up filters to put certain emails into different folders. Gmail makes this easy. Client emails in one folder, newsletters in another, to-dos in a third. Keep your inbox focused on items you need to deal with this week.
  • Check your inbox twice a day, and turn it off the rest of the time. This allows you to focus on other work without the distraction of incoming emails. [Disclosure: It’s great advice although I find it hard to follow myself!]

2.    Use Social Media Tools to Schedule Your Tweets and Facebook Posts

One of the keys to successful use of social media is to post updates at the times your audience is most likely to see them. But this doesn’t mean you have to be on Twitter and Facebook every hour. There are many tools that allow you to pre-schedule both tweets and status updates, minimizing your actual time attending to your social media efforts. My favorite tools are Hootsuite and Pluggio. My virtual assistant uses Hootsuite once a week to pre-schedule posts that I put out regularly and I also use it to automatically tweet new blog posts, YouTube videos and more (via the RSS Feed functionality.) I use Pluggio to pre-schedule tweets on a daily basis — I can sit down and in one session schedule retweets, answer questions and thank those who have mentioned me, without flooding the tweet stream with a dozen posts in a short amount of time. And Facebook now lets you schedule status updates to publish at a later time/day.

3.    Go With The Flow

Some days, you just don’t feel like working on the items on your to-do list. Other times, you may find yourself up in the wee hours of the morning, on a roll. GO WITH IT. If you find yourself stuck (and there is nothing you really have to do right now(change to then??), go for a walk, take a nap, play hooky and go shopping. Too many times we set artificial deadlines for ourselves and then stick with those deadlines, pushing through when we are struggling to concentrate – making the task take far longer than necessary, and sometimes resulting in less than our best work. Be flexible with yourself and your deadlines (isn’t that why we are solo business owners?) I guarantee that when you are truly ready to tackle that task, it will go more smoothly.

4.    Mistakes Are OK

One of my favorite sayings is: “ If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t moving fast enough.” It doesn’t have to be perfect, whether it is an email, a newsletter, a product, or a marketing campaign. Business owners tend to have exceptionally high standards for themselves, but are very understanding and forgiving when others make mistakes. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Get it done, get it out there; you can always fix any missteps later.